<DIV><p>"Achingly brilliant, an epic made mad, made extraordinary."?Junot Díaz</p><p>"Hallucinatory, lyrical, by turns comic and tragic, this extraordinary novel should make Sjón an international name. His evocation of seventeenth century Iceland through the eyes of a man born before his time has stuck in my mind like nothing else I've read in the last year."?Hari Kunzru</p><p>The year is 1635. Iceland is a world darkened by superstition, poverty, and cruelty.</p><p>Men of science marvel over a unicorn's horn, poor folk worship the Virgin in secret, and both books and men are burnt.</p><p>Jonas Palmason, a poet and self-taught healer, has been condemned to exile for heretical conduct, having fallen foul of the local magistrate. Banished to a barren island, Jonas recalls his gift for curing "female maladies," his exorcism of a walking corpse on the remote Snjafjoll coast, the frenzied massacre of innocent Basque whalers at the hands of local villagers, and the deaths of three of his children.</p><p><B>Sjón</B> was born in Reykjavik in 1962. He won the Nordic Council's Literature Prize (the equivalent of the Man Booker Prize) for <I>The Blue Fox</I>, which was also longlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize in 2009. Sjón was nominated for an Oscar for the song lyrics he wrote for Björk in the film <I>Dancer in the Dark</I> and has been working on Björk's latest project, <I>Biophilia</I>. His work has been translated into twenty-three languages.</p><BR></DIV>